An utterance is essentially a unit of spoken language, often defined as a stretch of speech preceded and followed by a pause or change of speaker. Unlike a formal grammatical sentence (which is a written language concept), an utterance can be any vocal expression – it might be a single word (“Yes.”), a phrase, or a complete sentence – produced by one speaker at one time. In language development and analysis, SLPs use “utterance” as the basic unit when transcribing speech samples, which allows measures like Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) to be calculated.
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